The seven fat years : and how to do it again /

Wall Street Journal editor Bartley here extols economic policies of the Reagan years and calls for more of the same. Tracing the pre-Reagan ``stagflation'' produced by Nixon's price controls, Ford's WIN campaign and Carter's ``voluntary'' price guidelines, the author tracks how 1980s tax cuts and deregulation, combined with Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker's inflation-curbing money controls, unleashed American enterprise and boosted national production 30% with a 20% rise in per capita income. In extraordinary detail, and with frequent ironical jabs at the ``unenlightened,'' Bartley analyzes (among other things) congressional economic attitudes (mostly awful), foreign trade debits (complex but necessary), the federal deficit (not to worry), the savings-and-loan debacle (the New Deal started it), mergers, acquisitions and junk bonds (not so bad, really) and the fallacy of ``fairly'' taxing the rich. He puts in a good word, too, for Jay Gould and other maligned 19th-century ``robber barons'' for their roles in our economic expansion. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This is a history and unabashed defense of supply-side economics and the Reagan economic revolution of 1982-89 by the editor of The Wall Street Journal . His basic thesis is that the ``Seven Fat Years'' can be reproduced for an indefinite period if we simply return to the lower taxes of supply-side economics (or ``the new classical economics,'' as Bartley prefers to call it). Further, he believes that with the United States now the sole superpower and its standard of living the envy of the world it can provide the economic leadership for a worldwide ``belle epoque.'' ``The moral of the Seven Fat Years is that economic growth counts.'' In addition to his arguments for supply-side economics, Bartley provides an interesting history of the development of that school of thought in the 1970s under the intellectual leadership of such figures as Arthur Laffer, Robert Mundell, and Jack Kemp. Recommended for academic and public libraries.-- Jeffrey R. Herold, Bucyrus P.L., Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From the editor of The Wall Street Journal--an ebullient and persuasive argument that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the 1990's could prove a belle époque for industrial powers like the US. To Bartley, the best way to ensure a bountiful future is to understand the forces responsible for the so-called seven fat years--the period from 1983-90 when America's GNP grew by almost one third in inflation-adjusted terms. Monetary and fiscal policy apart, the author attributes the long-lived recovery/expansion to, among other factors, the breakup of a domestic political stasis, the emergence of neoclassical economic theory, and a world-class communicator in the White House. (While the author doesn't dwell on it, his newspaper also played an influential role, cheering the business community in its efforts to overcome the stagflation of the 1970's.) By Bartley's account, the US could secure another boom by resuming the policies and practices that produced prosperity during the Reagan era. Not too surprisingly, he puts further tax cuts (to promote a renaissance of entrepreneurial enterprise) and spending curbs at the top of his agenda. As for perceived problems such as the federal budget deficit and the S&L debacle, the author views them through a conservative's eyes, meaning he dismisses the one as irrelevant and attributes the other to venal lawmakers who kept regulatory authorities from doing their jobs in timely fashion. Bartley goes on to caution that if elitist opinion-makers insist on seeking atonement for putative excesses of the past in renewed intervention or other self-defeating courses, the country could well face seven lean years. He also warns that even the US can no longer isolate itself behind protectionist trade barriers from the Global Village's economy. Shrewd, informed commentary on the socioeconomic and political state of the union.